ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV): Your companion to the ITIL 4 Managing Professional DSV certification

By Claire Agutter and Katie Villa

ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV)

If you’ve achieved your ITIL 4 Foundation certificate, you’re probably planning the next stage in your ITIL journey and deciding which qualification to work towards. ITIL 4 DSV provides essential knowledge and capabilities for service management professionals, focusing on the engagements between a service provider and its customers, users, suppliers and partners, and how demand is converted into value via IT-enabled services.

DSV is one of the ITIL 4 advanced level modules that leads to the MP (Managing Professional) certification. The module is aimed at managers and aspiring managers at all levels, providing them with the practical skills to build effective relationships across the SVS.

An excellent supplement to any ITIL 4 DSV training course

The majority of this book is based on the official AXELOS ITIL® 4: Drive Stakeholder Value publication and the associated Drive Stakeholder Value Managing Professional syllabus. It provides students with the information they need to pass the DSV exam, and help them become a successful practitioner.

This book is suitable for ITIL v3 Experts, ITIL 4 MP students, ITSM (IT service management) practitioners who are adopting ITIL 4, approved training organisations, IT service managers, IT managers and those in IT support roles.

The guide focuses on:

• The customer journey;
• Fostering stakeholder relationships;
• How to: shape demand and define service offerings, and align expectations and agree service details;
• Onboarding and offboarding;
• Continual value co-creation;
• Realising and validating service value; and
• Exam preparation.

A useful tool throughout your career

In addition to being an essential study aid, the author — a seasoned ITSM professional — also provides additional guidance throughout the book, which you can lean on once your training and exam are over. The book includes her own practical experience, from which she gives advice, and points to think about along the way, so that you can refer back to this book for years to come – long after you’ve passed your exam.

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of the PeopleCert group. Used under licence from PeopleCert. All rights reserved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: itgovernance
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781787783539

Claire Agutter

Claire Agutter is interested in anything that helps IT work better. She has more than two decades experience as a service management consultant, trainer, speaker and author. She is the founder of Scopism, an organisation which focuses on publications, events and consultancy linked to SIAM (Service Integration and Management). She recruited and led the team of volunteers that contributed to the SIAM Foundation and Professional Bodies of Knowledge publications and created the online SIAM community. From 2018-23, she was nominated by Computer Weekly as one of the most influential women in UK tech. A long time IT Governance Publishing collaborator, Claire has written ITIL® study guides covering both ITIL® v3 and ITIL® 4, with her ITIL Foundation Essentials ITIL 4 Edition – The ultimate revision guide rating 4.6 on Amazon. To view all her publications, visit: https://www.itgovernancepublishing.co.uk/author/claire-agutter.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

How to use this book

The majority of this book is based on the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) publication and the associated ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value syllabus.

The ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value publication describes the steps of co-creating value through services in significant detail and is beneficial to both customers and service providers. It explains how to optimize the value of the journey for all stakeholders, for example, to convert opportunity and demand into value and to drive stakeholder value.

The key themes related to driving stakeholder value and its supporting management practices are the focus of the DSV publication and associated training and examination.

In this companion publication to DSV, in addition to helping you prepare for your certification, I also want to give you advice and guidance that will lead to you using this book once your training and exam are complete. I’ve added my own practical experience and given you advice and points to think about along the way. My goal is for you to refer back to this book in years to come, not just put it away once you’ve passed your exam. With this additional content, you’ll find this book is an excellent supplement to any training course and a useful tool in your ongoing career.

As you read the book, assume that all the content is related to the syllabus unless it is highlighted in one of two ways:

Something for you: an exercise for you to complete to apply the ITIL 4 concepts in your own role, or a point for you to think about. This content is not examinable.

Practical experiences: any content marked out with this image is based on my own experience and is not examinable.

The content highlighted as something for you to think about or practical experience might also refer to the Banksbest case study you can find in Appendix A. I’ll use the case study to give an example of how something would work in the real world, or to help you apply what you’re reading about. Case studies can really help to bring abstract concepts to life. The case study is not examinable, but using it will help you get a deeper understanding of the DSV concepts you are learning.

Let’s start with something for you now:

Why not read the case study and make a note of your first impressions of the Banksbest organisation and its plans before you start to study the DSV content in this book?

Unless stated otherwise, all quotations are from ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value and Practice Guides published by AXELOS in 2020. Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2020. Used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1: THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

In this introductory chapter, we’ll review a key concept for DSV – the customer journey. The content includes:

•The concept of the customer journey; and

•How to design and improve customer journeys.

ITIL 4 describes a customer journey as the complete end-to-end experience customers have with one or more service providers and/or their products through the touchpoints and service interactions.

Value streams and customer journeys

Figure 1 shows the relationships between value streams and customer journeys.

Figure 1: Relationships between value streams and customer journeys¹

A customer journey will always rely on one or more value streams from one or more service providers. A customer journey can include multiple value streams from one service provider, or value streams from different service providers.

A value stream can support multiple customer journeys. The customer journey includes value stream activities that are part of what is known as the ‘band of visibility’. There will be other value stream activities that are not visible to the customer, so these value streams don’t form part of the customer journey.

The customer journey isn’t always linear. It can involve moving around between different touchpoints, and repeated contact at some touchpoints. The customer might start in the middle of the expected customer journey, so the service provider needs to continually monitor customer journeys and improve its understanding of customer behaviour.

Think about your own customer journeys for the services you use every day. For example, a TV streaming service, or an insurance product. Where did your customer journey start? Has it finished? What value streams have supported your journey? You could think about new user onboarding, billing, customer service, etc. as examples of value streams.

Customer journeys are an important part of the overall customer and user experience. Customer experience (CX) is the sum of functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a customer. User experience (UX) is the sum of the functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a user.

The customer journey forms part of the customer’s overall perception of a service provider, along with other influencing factors like brand, reputation, previous experiences, etc.

Figure 2 shows the three aspects of customer and user experience.

Figure 2: Three aspects of the customer and user experience²

The definitions for both customer and user experience mention ‘emotional interactions’. This is an important point for you to consider as a service provider or in a service management role. In the past, we’ve not always considered the human element of service interactions. I’ve worked with organisations where there has been fierce resistance to change because the end users have an emotional attachment to a system they are using. It might not work very well, the new system might be a huge improvement, but I’ve seen a real sense of affection for older systems that can lead to a reluctance to change.

As service providers, we can focus too much on the facts (Why wouldn’t you want this? It’s twice as fast!) and miss the emotional elements. It’s really important to have proper conversations with end users and customers so that we have the full picture and can carry out our role more effectively.

Customer journey design

Customer journey design is based on these principles:

•How you deliver a service is as important as what is delivered.

•The overall journey is more important than each individual touchpoint.

•Understanding the customer journey allows providers to focus on maximising value, and on experiences over outcomes.

The ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value syllabus and related publication are based around the steps in a customer journey.

These steps are:

•Explore

•Engage

•Offer

•Agree

•Onboard

•Co-create

•Realise

Before you move on and learn about the customer journey in more detail, why not try creating your own customer journey map? You can use a product or service from your own organisation, or perhaps use Mortbank from the Banksbest case study. Note down what happens in each step of the customer journey, and refer back to it when we study the customer journey in more detail.

Customer journey key concepts

The key concepts related to a customer journey are:

•Benefits

•Stakeholder aspirations

•Journey mapping

•Personas

•Scenarios

•Maps

•Understanding the customer experience

We’ll review them one by one in this section.

Benefits

Understanding the customer journey delivers benefits for the service consumer and the service provider, as shown in table 1.

Stakeholder aspirations

Stakeholders make choices based on their requirements. Value can be defined in the context of functional, social and emotional dimensions. Service providers need to define the stakeholder experience aspiration, which is based on their needs, wants, stereotypes and emotions. Service choices are not always rational and logical, for example why would anyone pay more for a luxury hotel when a basic hotel option still delivers a bed in a room? What are the extra tangible and intangible service elements they are willing to pay for?

Defining the stakeholder experience aspiration allows the service provider to identify, understand and master the customer journey. Figure 3 shows the design steps.

Figure 3: The stages involved in designing end-to-end customer journeys and experiences³

Journey mapping

Customer journey mapping includes an understanding of touchpoints and service interactions.

A touchpoint is any event where a service consumer or potential service consumer has an encounter with the service provider and/or its products and resources.

A service interaction is a reciprocal action between a service provider and a service consumer that co-creates value.

Effective customer journey mapping optimises the whole journey; it is possible to have excellent touchpoints but a terrible overall experience. Customer journey maps need to take into account the mental models of the customer, and what level of service they expect.

A customer journey map helps an organisation understand its stakeholders. The journey map will include:

•Stakeholders;

•Time frame;

•Channels (e.g. social media, email, video, portals);

•Actions before the product or service experience;

•Actions during the product or service experience; and

•Actions after the product or service experience.

Personas

A persona is a fictitious, yet realistic, description of a typical or target customer or user of a service or product.

Creating personas can help support journey mapping exercises. It’s not possible to map every single user journey, so personas are used to create generic flows. Personas are described as if they are real people, rather than being impersonal stereotypes.

One of Banksbest’s customer groups is residential landlords, who want mortgages for properties that they intend to rent out. Create a customer persona for a landlord, adding as much detail as you can based on your own experience and research. You could include a name, some personal and demographical information, their desired outcome, their motivations, what worries them, etc. You can also try this exercise for your own organisation’s customers. How much do you know about them?

Scenarios

Scenarios are "short stories about personas trying to achieve their goals by using the